Thursday, January 31, 2013

I have a feeling we're not in Pullman anymore

During our layover in Chicago we made
Jacob Bergman and Garland come up with names for our blog. All of
their rejected ideas (which were all of their ideas) will be the
titles of our entries. Enjoy and feel free to mock the boys.

This is the sunset over South America from our plane

The final leg of Panama to Bolivia was
probably our least favorite. It started with Elise and I being
separated on the plane so we sat with strangers who mostly stared at
us for 5 hours. We also had to fill out a lot of paperwork on the
plane separately which was also difficult. Getting our visas was
relatively easy, we were ready with all the required paperwork and
ended up not needing most of it. The fellow passengers and airport
staff enjoyed staring at us while we got everything worked out.
Customs in Bolivia is a lottery system. When it is your turn, you
push a green button on what looks like a metal detector and if it
flashes red the officers go through all your stuff. We were the only
two white girls on the plane- of course we were chosen to have our
bags looked through. 3 customs officers had a fun time going through
all our bags, giggling at what they saw as they went along. They
weren't happy to see the camera I was carrying for Bethel but
eventually they let us go.

Bob and Kathy Golden were waiting for
us outside of the airport and helped us get all of our bags into the
van and drove us to Bethel. By this time it was after 11pm so they
hesitantly invited us to Morning Worship but understood we couldn’t
make it-after all we were going on 50 hours total of travel- but of
course we said yes. So we rushed into our room, unpacked what we
needed for the next day and slept. The temperature at night was still
70 degrees and humid but thankfully we have an air conditioner in our
room.

Our room! The towels were wrapped in the shape of flowers. We had a welcome letter and folder filled with info we need to know like rules and passwords. There were Atalayas and Yearbooks on the table for us. They just got their Yearbooks this week so everyone is excited about it.

We have cute kitchenette and a stocked fridge with snacks! We were tempted to try a Bolivian beer but not enough that we actually opened it

Our cute bathroom. Faucets says F and C instead of H and C. A little confusing at first because you dont want 'caliente' when you are expecting 'cold'.. There are also directions everywhere of how to clean it.

We woke up around 6am which is 2am
back home <--- be impressed!! Morning worship was very sweet.
There were more people there than we expected (we'll give you an
actual number of how many volunteers serve at the branch after our
tour in a little while but we guessed around 100). Everything was in
Spanish so we followed along in our Spanish daily texts and Bibles.
We ate a corn and cheese pudding casserole thing. A couple at our
table was learning English so they enjoyed practicing on us. Everyone
told us that the weather in Sucre is very nice and the town is very
colonial.

Tours start after 8:30 so with this
free time we are taking turns using the internet (no wifi) and
updating this blog because we didn't have time back in Panama (that
is why we uploaded our Panama entry this morning). Panama is
beautiful by the way, we hope on the way back we can see more of it.
We also assume our blog entrees will get less and less the farther
into our trip we get so we might as well do what we can now so expect
another one later today.

This is the little friend Elise found while I was writing this. After taking a picture neither of us had the guts to kill it or get near it. We had a maid come kill it and she laughed at us in spanish.